If you have a spare ear over the next week, have a listen to yesterday’s Early Music Show (the shorter podcast version should be available outside the UK), in which Catherine Bott talks to David Wulstan. When I bristle at being described as a musicologist (perish the thought) I try to respond with a simple ‘I’m not a musicologist’. As you’ll hear in the programme, Wulstan’s response to the same accusation is to scream, and threaten the use of some of his martial arts expertise. Perhaps I’ll start trying that too.

It was his first LP of Gibbons’s music with the Clerkes of Oxenford (now comprising the first nine tracks of this) that got me interested in early music in the first place, when I borrowed it from the Mitchell Library in 1981 or thereabouts. Listening to it now, there are plenty of things that you can say are ‘wrong’. His theories about high pitch are viewed with some suspicion these days, and one of the viol players later told me of his horror at being presented with parts written out in B flat minor: the use of string instruments in a church setting is historically out of place anyway. But … the sound that the choir makes is thrilling in a way that the work of later collegiate-influenced choirs just isn’t (not to me at any rate), and Wulstan’s intention to remove himself from the musical result and present the composer’s work as uninterpreted as possible was a very forward-thinking approach back in the 70s, even if in some cases he had composed quite a few of the notes himself. Also, their wonderful recording of Tallis’s Gaude Gloriosa Dei Mater has really loud traffic noise on it, and it doesn’t matter at all.

Incidentally, my Early Music Show episode on Mary Queen of Scots is getting a repeat on 2 June, and it features Bill Taylor and Barnaby Brown doing fun things in Stirling Castle.